Our second day in Valparaiso was more work and less play. Karen needed to put in several hours of work in the morning and she had to phone a client in the afternoon. I welcomed the chance to put together the blog post for our first day in Valparaiso. So today we decided to keep it simple. We planed to walk a couple of kilometers down the hill towards the ocean to find someplace for lunch.

After a few weeks of work and study in the country home of our friends, we have back a couple of bags and headed Valparaíso. Valparaíso is one of the largest cities in Chile after Santiago. It is located 120 kilometers northwest of Santiago on the Pacific coast. Before the opening of the Panama Canal, Valparaíso was a major Pacific port for ships crossing the Straits of Magellan. There are a lot of buildings dating back to the 19th century. They make stop and imagine what they were like in their prime. The cobblestone roads that still exist most likely once carried horses and carts.

We have returned from three days and a couple of nights exploring part of Santiago. We left most of our belongings at our friend’s house in El Ajail and stayed at an Airbnb apartment for two nights in Barrio Bellavista. It seems like we keep finding the bohemian areas of cities south of the equator. The Bellavista neighborhood is known as Santiago’s bohemian quarter. The area has popular locations; the most noteworthy are Cerro San Cristóbal (St. Christopher’s Hill) and La Chascona.

We have made it to to our friend’s home on wonderful, green acre and a half south of Santiago. We needed to get adapters for the plugs on our computers and phones. Shopping took a while. Our phones’ SIM cards didn’t activate effortlessly as advertised when we put them into our phones. Our electronics are plugged in now, but it is late and I think everyone else went to bed some time ago. I’ll update this post with better information tomorrow or as soon as I can!

We arrived in Santiago, Chile just after 11:00 PM local time so we booked a night at a hotel just 10 minutes from the airport. It was a nice little place in a quiet, gated community with heated beds that Lucas and Karen immediately took a liking to. They were a bit reluctant to crawl out from under the warm covers in the morning. It is going into Spring down here now, but it is a bit cooler than we have been used to the past few months.